If you wanted to take advantage of an ATM, you might equip it with a skimmer, a device which captures electronic information from people’s cards and uses it to siphon away money. Two thieves in Pennsylvania, however, decided to go another route and rip the whole damn machine out instead.

It might finally be time to abandon cash altogether as a new type of ATM card skimmer that uses a technique called “periscope skimming” has officially been found installed in ATMs in the United States, and from the outside there’s no way to tell that a machine has been compromised.

ATM skimmers are so successful is because they’re nearly impossible to catch. They’re cheap and easy to make and just slide onto anything you might use to swipe a card, stealing your information in the process. They’re also part of the reason you have to use that annoying chip card that takes forever to process.

Be careful where you put your card. The ATM manufacturer NCR has recently issued an alert to banks, warning them that there’s been a rise in the use of “deep insert skimmers,” which hide inside cash machines and are virtually impossible to spot.

Watch where you put your card. The ATM security organization EAST has published a new report pointing out that the use of s0-called Throat Inlay Skimming devices—which are hidden within the card slot—is rising.

You might think that the best way to fight card skimmers would be hunt them down and destroy them. But in California, at least, police have been leaving the skimmers right where they are—after they’ve fitted GPS trackers to them, that is.

ATM skimmers just keep getting scarier. In his ongoing series on skimmer innovation, security guru Brian Krebs highlighted a new card skimmer—the increasingly thin device that intercepts and snags your credit card details—that's been spotted in the wild. And unlike the vast majority of skimmers that attach to or…

Just like consumer tech, criminal tech advances in leaps and bounds—and none more so than the ATM skimmer. Now, the kinds of skimmers being used are so slim and small that you'll never see them—and their battery life means they last an age, too.

Be careful on the subway. Sure, the platforms are safer than ever, and the cars are even pretty clean. But credit card thieves seem to come up with a new way to steal your personal information every day. The latest ploy: a card-reading spy camera, hiding above the MetroCard machine.

Valentin Boanta has a lot of free time on his hands—five years worth, to be exact. That's because Boanta is currently serving a prison sentence for, according to Reuters, "supplying gadgets to an organized crime gang used to conceal ATM skimmers." So with all that time to think about what he's done, the apparently…